Alone, neatly frocked in a blue mini dress, and gently picking an electric guitar on the too-spacious-for-comfort Fletcher Opera Theatre stage, Angel Olsen intoned with an assured tremble, "I want to be naked," and you didn't for a second doubt a word of it. A member of Will Oldham's Bonnie "Prince" Billy touring band, the solo singer-songwriter specializes in just such nakedly exposed emotion. "I don't need my body," she then moan-yodeled. "I don't need my bahhh-ah-ahhhh-uh-dy, I'm floating away, I'm floating away...." The packed crowd collectively held its breath until Olsen gave them permission to exhale.Afterwards, a voice shouted out a request: "Creator, Destroyer!" (from Olsen's 2010 cassette EP Strange Cacti.) She replied slyly, "Are you sure?" What followed was one of the festival's most mesmerizing performances, with Olsen delivering the apocalyptically hyperbolic metaphor of a shattered relationship like a grim yet suspenseful girl-group fairy tale. Eventually, the song just trailed off — the lyrics, "Fuck this and everything we've done / Fuck you / Fuck you and your lies," remaining unsung — as Olsen snapped us back into the more maddening everyday: "I never know how to end that song… he's getting married soon… and she's a nice girl… and…."
A genial, graying, red-faced dude sporting a beer belly and a Redd Foxx t-shirt, North Carolina drummer-singer-songwriter Terry Anderson has paid his bills over the years by writing the Georgia Satellites' "Battleship Chains" and Dan Baird's "I Love You Period," but that sells the man far too short. In the spirit of late Memphis magus Jim Dickinson and his we-can-play-fucking-anything-ya-got bands (Mudboy and the Neutrons, anyone?), or the alcoholic heroes of a local bowling league, the Olympic Ass-Kickin' team are the finest bar band you've ever seen (depending on how many drinks you've had at said bar). Anderson identifed one jaunty tune ("I Can Give You Everything") during his show at the Irish pub Tir Na Nog by saying, "I wrote that song, and Ms. Etta James covered it." No response. "She did!" he implored with a grin. We believe you, man.
Masami Akita, a.k.a. Merzbow, is the godfather of Japanoise, and at 56, with his long black hair, skinny frame, blankly inscrutable face, and black band t-shirt, seems utterly ageless. After releasing between 300 and 400 albums (including a 50-CD box set that is simultaneously unlistenable and life-changing), he has nothing to prove, but he was the most industrious musician in town during Hopscotch, appearing at day and night events, adding disturbing screech to David Thomas' disturbed real-talk with Pere Ubu and joining the agonizingly bleak New Jersey doom-metal band Evoken for whatever it is they do.Scattered notes from Merzbow's solo Kings Barcade gig:...card table and stage crammed with electronics — mixer, laptop, and a closet full of gear including fuzzbox, wah, guitar distortion pedals, ring modulator, oscillator, tone generator, etc. (Thanks to The New Yorker's Sasha Frere-Jones for investigating after a June gig in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.) Gizmo he plays like a guitar looks like a small garbage-can lid attached to a wired table leg with cables for strings that he scrapes and assaults with a hockey puck, or video-game controller (apparently, there's a contact mic involved). Screeching whipsaw owwww bound and gagged in a jet engine with a beat-splatter incinerating inside yr blast-furnace skull… fuck, Panzer stampede in chest, shit, heart-rate kablow, blood pressure fucked, where's the men's room? how long has this been happening – 10-15 minutes? –Dr. Lou Cypher administering an MRI in hell, a man at center front of stage shakes his fists defiantly as he quakes spasmodically, everybody anxious, uneasy, unable to swallow monstrous gulps of feedback, queasy, bowels, throat tightens, a rapier of feedback snaps across a spewing steam-engine obliterated immediately…at 15 mins. in, Merzbow towels off and at 22 mins., a sweaty plus-size man and woman writhe on top of each other on the floor down front (heads turn away), a dude in a wheelchair is feeling no pain, and the song ends at 24 mins…. We start again with a two-note synth salvo and distorted shuddering sheets of sound that are nothing but purely sincere violence and hatred, no release, no reason, no purpose, no life, no God, just unholy death howls and swarms of locust screaming as if they've been set ablaze, barometric convulsions, martial call-and-response, electrical storm front, the Grid eating its tail, now almost taking a solo, which can only mean he's decided to to kill us, 11 minutes have vanished, a woman hugs a pole with her head down as a ferocious buzzing cacophony vibrates the thick air, eyes blurring, ears not functioning, have to get out, end it all, pointlessness…utter genius….
The DJ/producer universe had a limited but fascinating representation at Hopscotch, and the trio of above artists covered an astounding amount of territory. Remix maniac extraordinaire DJ Paypal launched into his set at the Pour House with pure abandon, crouching behind his computer, bouncing up and down, trainwrecking through transitions with WTF disdain —footwork flurries, hoochie-mama boom, twinkly R&B melodies pummeled by sub-bass, kick-drum, and airhorn. A ghetto-techish chimpunk version of Frank Ocean's "Thinking About You" had the crowd singing along as he air-drummed and snapped a selfie.Outside on the City Plaza main stage Friday in place of Big Boi, A-Trak brought out Raleigh's EDM, uh, massive, as about 200 perma-tan college girls waving glowsticks (or wearing them as headdresses) and their flip-flop-bro insignificant others flailed and dipped to Diplo's "Bubble Butt," 2 Chainz's "I'm Different," Too $hort's "Keep Bouncin'," and the Pavlovian howls of Duck Sauce's "Big Bad Wolf." On the other end of the crowd-pleasing spectrum, Holly Herndon turned the CAM Raleigh museum space into a subtly disorienting exercise in cubist beat maneuvers. Layering and fragmenting bass jolts, vocal gasps, and darting drum stutters, she kept the gathered faithful waiting for a release that never quite came, rewarding their patience with an ever-evolving tease.The originally published version misidentified DJ Paypal as Lapalux. Our apologies to both artists.
A Brooklyn-born, Brussels-based composer, visual artist, filmmaker, and ritualistic performer who was part of the experimental music scene of the late '60s and '70s with Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Tony Conrad, and Philip Glass, 65-year-old Charlemagne Palestine was perhaps the festival's most intriguing act. And his performance at the Long View Center, a historic church near Moore Square that's now a "Center for Spiritual Living," drew a respectable crowd. After warbling an invocation while rubbing a snifter of cognac and summoning high-pitched squeals, the shaggy, Wilford Brimley-esque figure moved among his ever-present stuffed animals to the piano and performed a version of his most notable work, the trance-like Strumming Music. Alternately banging on two keys while pushing down the sustain pedal, he gradually built up clusters of notes, surging and droning until overtones emerged and formed a shuddering, expansive echo chamber of clanging bell tones. The piece ended after about 15 or so minutes, and as the crowd sat recovering, still rapt, Palestine donned what looked like two hula-girl hand puppets who chirped, "Good night, good bye." Then, he repeated the words, and smiled. So did we.
On Saturday night in City Plaza, Rev. J Spaceman and the Spiritualized flock were the festival's nominal headliner, and drew the largest crowd of the three-day weekend. Seated at stage right leading a quintet with two backup singers, Jason Pierce delivered junkie confessionals of psych-gospel redemption with his trademark, never-fails mix of dead cool, celestial yearning, and tenderly sculpted feedback. Anybody who was creaking and hobbling from tromping around Raleigh at all hours for two days (like certain music writers who had to down a jumbo iced coffee at 9 p.m. to keep from derping out) couldn't have found a more welcoming shore on which to wash up.Songs like "Here It Comes (The Road, Let's Go)," "Jane Says," and especially "Electricity" — which induced my only goose-bumps of the festival with its lurching, swirling power surge — rolled in and out of the crowd like a carefully calibrated tide of guitar distortion. From there, the show eased along pleasantly (I saw two other bands while Pierce fiddled away), but Pierce remains the only rock troubadour who can make a ludicrous line like, "Jesus Christ, look at what you gone and done / 2,000 years of lookin' down the barrel of a gun" seem like revolutionary scripture. As rock continues its ponderous descent, he's one of the true believers who's still able to tap into its ancient codes.
Taking the caned-into-cliché All Tomorrows Parties model of playing albums in their entirety to its inevitable extreme, Durham, N.C., folk-rock aesthetes Heather McEntire and Jenks Miller and their Mount Moriah crew played their first two albums plus an EP from front to back at the Fletcher Theatre on Saturday night. Though one can feel the desire to fidget petulantly against the group's tastefully rendered sepia portrait of Blue Ridge dolor and strum, the songs are so artfully sketched — and the instrumentation so skillfully daubed, and McEntire's voice so saturated in historic melancholy — that it's best to just put up your feet and enjoy the soothing view. What this night mostly proved was that the Moriah sound was fully formed from their first recorded material: The ambling, resonant plink of 2010's "The Letting Go" seemed to magically darken and silence every flickering cell-phone in the joint.
The talented musicians who make up this Chapel Hill power trio are veterans of various area bands, but those other projects would be hard-pressed to match the riff-snortin' statement of purpose that resounded through the Lincoln Theater on Saturday night. Led by singer-guitarist Nora Rogers, Solar Halos blazed up stoner-rock the way you always wanted it to burn, gave heavy psych a gritty drive that never allowed it to nod out, hinted at doominess but didn't submit to the darkness, and forged their own hard-ass, hit-and-run, bluesy blare.Wringing crushing power chords from her Rickenbacker, Rogers commanded the stage while still immersing herself in the cathartic rchurn of drummer John Crouch (who, like Rogers, played with Mount Moriah's Jenks Miller in avant-metal band Horseback) and bassist Eddie Sanchez (who played with Mount Moriah's Heather McEntire in post-punk band Bellafea). Rogers and Sanchez shared vocals, which usually hovered above or below the clamor, never intruding or making a fuss. Still, on a song like "Frost," as the trio gradually ascended to new levels of ferociousness, Rogers' voice shifted from a highway howl to a powerful incantation of sorts, as if she was willing her way out of the ashes and into the light.
A 63-year-old Alabama artist famed for his sandstone carvings, found-object paintings, sculptures, and all-encompassing environments, Lonnie Holley has just recorded his second album of improvised music, Keeping a Record of It, with songs like the free-associating, keyboard-trilling, more-poignant-than-anyone-could-predict "Six Space Shuttles and 144,000 Elephants."Okay, you may be thinking, another weird old coot playing incomprehensible music that'd probably make the neighbors call the cops. Okay, sorta. And let me guess, he's playing in a "historic" church? Uh, yeah. But Lonnie Holley's music is simply too imbued with battered emotion, strange beauty, and stark epiphanies wrought by a bewildering fucking life for anybody to classify or diminish him. His voice is like a beat-to-shit horn that won't stop playing even when you throw it in the trash, and its bent bleat somehow contains a fractured, insistent hope so vast that you just have to gape in awe. Also, he's a glorious whistler. At one point, Holley meditated on a confrontation that he'd had with a schoolteacher when he was six years old; then he crooned this startling bit: "I said, 'Teacher, this is my worrrrlllldddd…" And it was. And it is.
As it turned out, the entire festival came down to this. The Prologue and the Epilogue. The event, the spectacle, the ground (holy or unholy) where anybody with a clue was posted up and digging in for the long, merciless, hopefully transformative haul. Negotiating an appearance by metal icons Sleep — bassist-singer Al Cisneros (also of OM), guitarist Matt Pike (also of High on Fire), and drummer Jason Roeder (also of Neurosis) — was apparently an extended fiasco, until it finally wasn't, since the band only convenes on fairly rare occasions (what up, Maryland Deathfest!). Well, all I can say is: whatever it took.On record, Sleep's deeply influential, doom-wracked, stoner-rock roar is startling enough — like looking out the window and seeing a dinosaur awaken and push up through the ground, groggily shake off the dirt, and go about the obvious business of excitedly flattening everything in its path. But it's virtually tourism compared to experiencing the trio live. Standing in front of a mighty fortification of Marshall stacks at the Lincoln Theater before the most rabid, tightly packed crowd of the festival, the band was an elemental force. No matter what song they played ("Holy Mountain" was particularly earth-moving), it was the same resolute, self-evident declaration: These riffs and these rhythms represent history's ceaseless stomp – forward, backward, forward again, but most importantly, over us. The bearded Cisneros, stoically imposing like some sort of biker monk, may have been singing about a "black steed" or "spacepod" or "crimson door" or "Green Herbsmen" (the band is not without its sly wit), but Sleep's relentless drunken-master swing and groove was not about fantasy; ultimately, it evoked heat, cold, wind, fire, water, the elements of life and death that we cannot, in any way, control. Beefy, shaggy guitarist Matt Pike, shirtless and elaborately tattooed, presented his guitar parts as a series of processionals — he swaggered forward, holding his white Gibson Les Paul Supreme, executed the song's necessary grinding hook, and then retreated, only to repeat, for 10 minutes or so at a time. He came and went like the tide, lifting us up and wearing us down. There were occasional crowd-surfers, but they faded quickly.It's no wonder that Sleep's return to the primordial has had such an impact in the past 20 years, as the culture has increasingly attempted to digitally edit itself into some rarefied state of constant amusement. Sleep says no, and by saying no with such an unflinching, vital, humbling commitment, they redefine yes. Heed the steed, y'all.